


got a feeling i could be someone

by ilgaksu



Series: shut your mouth, baby (stand and deliver) [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Bandits & Outlaws, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Wild West
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 21:49:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19732444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: “This isn’t a place we’ll ever be selling,” Mama had said, with some finality, setting the plates for dinner that night, bringing her hands down over and over a little too hard, the china ringing out against the wood as though a body struck by a fist. Lance was half-waiting for her to break one. It would have been better, at least have given her the satisfaction of snapping fully. “They think they can own the whole damn state, but the lot of you were born on this land and you’ll bury me here, do you hear me, Leandro?”The fire happened three weeks later.





	got a feeling i could be someone

Lance was eighteen years old when the Galra Corporation tried to buy his family’s ranch. He remembers looking up from where he was bent over the kitchen table at the raised sound of his mother’s voice, since she’d hardly done that outside of him oversleeping on church. He remembers he was helping Nadia work through her sampler - absently re-threading her needle in between checking over Carlos’ accounts for the month, since he always forgot to carry the decimal over and why they’d ever bothered letting him have first lick at it purely on account of him being born first - 

He remembers the thread slipping out of his mouth when she heard him yelling at the company man to get on out of here and only to come back on a cold day in hell. How he’d snapped his hand to Nadia’s shoulder and held her back in her seat, both of them sat in the cool dark of the inside, looking at the silhouettes on the other side of the curtain and listening to the almighty racket. It felt as if the cattle out on the land froze to match, all of them holding still and small and managing the sounds of their breathing. 

The man left. 

“This isn’t a place we’ll ever be selling,” Mama had said, with some finality, setting the plates for dinner that night, bringing her hands down over and over a little too hard, the china ringing out against the wood as though a body struck by a fist. Lance was half-waiting for her to break one. It would have been better, at least have given her the satisfaction of snapping fully. “They think they can own the whole damn state, but the lot of you were born on this land and you’ll bury me here, do you hear me, Leandro?”

The fire happened three weeks later. 

*

If you make something into a story, you get to put it outside of you. By that same logic, if you make yourself into a story, you can call it a kind of amputation, right? Sure you can. Just have to - you just have to do it like this, see? You spin it all into rumour so you make the place you came from, the clay you came coughing into life out of, all separate, and that’s the end of it then. It’s separate. It’s something else. It doesn’t have to be you anymore. 

But for all of that’s bullshit. But for how Lance still kept his name, the one his mama gave him, holy water cupped in her hands over his head. How he kept it even for all they told him it wasn’t worth the keeping, on account of every outlaw worth their salt taking an alias. It’s a quick way to get caught, they told him, but Lance had wanted to be known again and so he’d held onto it anyway, sanding the syllables down, three into one like they taught in the Sunday schools. And even though near nobody calls him Leandro no more, Lance is still familiar, Lance is something he can live with. And there’s got to be something to get up for, hasn’t there? So he held onto his surname anyway, stubbornly, against all their advice, because they all think he’s a joke at first but they’ll be waiting a long, long time for the punchline. He’s not laughing. This way, when the bodies start dropping down onto porches - it’s sort of funny, how all the dirt on the floor is suddenly visible so close up, isn’t it? - they’ll know. When the people who need to start seeing their friends dying in reams in every newspaper, no safe place left in the whole unholy state, they’ll know it’s him. They’ll know they’re next, that the space between the obituaries and them is a narrowing gap, and it’ll be fair, that way. It’ll rebalance the scales, that way - when he isn’t the only one stuck getting haunted. 

*

He finds Hunk first - stood by a dirt road trying to get the hell out of town, and Lance says he’ll take him the next twenty miles, and then it becomes another twenty, and another, unspooling until it makes no sense to quit now, even though Hunk had bartered for his own horse and could split any time he liked. They don’t so much find Pidge as she finds them, hightailing it out of her city’s limits in her missing brother’s clothes, hair cut short and badly. Hunk had fixed it for her the second night, and that’s what had made her cry: someone being kind to her. And Lance - 

Lance needs someone to love the way some people need three drinks to get to sleep. He needs someone to look after, someone who’ll let him pretend he’s looking after them, on account of how he’s just been made like that. It’s less about nourishment than it is about sustaining. It’s less eating for the sake of eating and more like he’s starving. Nadia hadn’t really needed him to help her rethread her needle every single time, had she? It had just been about the ritual of it. 

They know what happened - Hunk and Pidge do - because Veronica visits them at depots and gives Lance a list of times and places, the closing loops of her vowels like the noose she keeps warning him about. 

(He’s never seen her in the company uniform. Perhaps it’s better that way. He doesn’t even know if there is one, but be imagines there’s got to be some kind of something, since when he’s tying their hands behind their backs, lined up outside their stagecoaches like dominoes, they all have the same look about their clothes. Their eyes, too, but that’s more to do with the business of getting robbed senseless, their pupils black and round as the end of the pistol pointed in their faces.) 

They know why there’s always people in Lance’s old home stretch of the state who’ll open their doors to them in the middle of the night, even though some of them do still call him Leandro and maybe because of it. They know why when they go to leave some of the older women stroke right down his cheek, a kind of touch that splits him open, and say how he should take care of himself, for his mother’s sake. They say he used to be such a kind boy, too, only they say that when they think he’s out of earshot. He’d always been the better one at the accounts, they say, _remember when -_ and then hastily add the next part. _Not to speak ill of the dead, of course. Carlos was a good man. God rest his soul._

*

Keith Kogane joins them a year into it. Lance is nearly twenty. He’s got his blood money, and he’s progressing onto the killing portion of the promise he’d made to his brother’s grave, after the funeral his parents sold the ranch outright to pay for. There’s a good thirteen of them in their crew now alongside himself, Hunk and Pidge: people come and go, but they try to keep it at capacity when they can for the big jobs. That’s not a problem anymore. He’s stopped being a joke, thanks to Veronica, thanks to Hunk, thanks to Pidge. They say he has the Midas touch these days. 

Anyway, thirteen’s been lucky for them, so he’s not got any plans on upsetting the equilibrium, so to speak, but then - 

But then, there’s Keith. He approaches them one night, in a saloon so rent apart by wear it’s as likely to fall down around their ears as not by the time the night’s over. It’s dog-cheap, though, and it’s another ten days to the next heist. 

“What makes you think you’re qualified?” Lance drawls, just to be shitty about it, head tipped back to drink. He doesn’t see but hears the gasp, hears the thunk of a knife hitting the wall just shy of his ear. He snaps his chair back onto all four legs and looks at where Keith is stood there - eyes cool, even with Hunk’s pistol pulled on him. 

“You could’ve hit me,” Lance points out. “No job in it for you if I’m dead meat.” 

“Couldn’t have,” Keith replies. 

“On account of?” 

“On account of how I didn’t want to.”

“Bringing out a circus trick isn’t clever if they can get you first. Bullets are better.”

“I can shoot just fine,” Keith says, and then drops the truth of it down on the table. “I was born to it.” 

“You were, were you?” 

“Sure I was. I’m Krolia’s boy.” 

Fucking hell. _Krolia’s_ only son, up and joining them? Where the fuck has he been hiding out? Isn’t the kid meant to be dead, dragged out in the dust at sixteen, Krolia herself gone out one night and never come back? Lance remembers the Wanted posters for the whole damn family plastered all over downtown. Lance, a romantic - unwilling to entertain the idea of the boy with the large dark eyes being dead in a ditch somewhere - had always privately figured he must have skipped the state after the whole business with his father’s passing. Hadn’t his Da been from San Antonio? Why the hell hadn’t he gone there? 

“You have any way of proving that?” Lance eventually asks. 

“Nope.”

"Not a single one?"

"Not a single one." 

"So we're meant to be taking your claims on faith?" 

Keith merely shrugs in response. 

"You don't have to be taking anything. I'm just telling you how it is." He pauses. "Can I have my knife back?" He points over Lance's shoulder, as casual as if they were passing pleasantries on a Sunday morning, waiting for the preacher to come shake their goddamn hands. Jesus H. _Christ._

In the end, Lance gives him the knife back, Keith walks away from their table and keeps to a solitary corner of the saloon, and Lance figures it's all done with. Only, the next morning, Keith's stood there next to the others, with the most beautiful horse Lance has ever seen, like if someone had turned a black silk bodice into an animal. 

"I didn't say yes to you," Lance tells him. "Just so we're clear on that score. I've not said one single yes since you started on last night, and you're not getting one neither, so don't be holding your breath, you hear me? Don't be getting your hopes up, since -" 

"Sure," Keith interrupts, swinging up into his saddle. "But just so we _are_ clear - you didn't say no or nothing." 


End file.
